An almost-true story
The Engineer seemed inordinately happy. “I’m done”, he announced.
The VP’s jaw dropped, his pretzel clinging to his lower lip like a cartoon cigar. The last time he went to the lab, the product was still a pile of cuts and jumpers held together by scope probes. It looked like Kafka’s cockroach on life support. There was a board meeting coming up next week; if it was really done then the VP finally had some good news to report.
The Engineer rambled on a bit … taking a few days off … nude windsurfing off Truro beach … toy train convention … hot sauce festival … back a week from Monday. The VP hardly heard a word and The Engineer vanished as quickly as he had appeared.
As he wandered towards the lab, the VP wondered whether their luck had finally turned. The hum of instruments greeted him as he walked through the door, and there was the cockroach, looking much as it had for the last three weeks. But something was different. The LEDs blinked reassuringly. The scope traces looked perfect, not those noisy things they had been trying to kill. And the display showed good data. Very good data.
But it was not nearly ready to submit for agency approval. The whole internal verification cycle still needed to execute. A lot of the parts looked like they came out of the junk drawer, and anyway a new layout was needed to get rid of the cuts and jumpers. It was far from “done”. The new version with the extra channels and integrated display had not even been started yet.
As he wandered back to his office, the VP realized that it was The Engineer who was done, not the product. The Engineer had reached his limit. He was a brilliant circuit designer, both analog and digital, and got key portions of the firmware working, but he was not a finisher. Asking him to shepherd the product through agency approvals and production was like asking a thoroughbred to plow a field, a bad use of both the of both the horse and the field. Better to have him get started on the new product and get version one on the shelf some other way.
As he reached for his coat, lightning flashed again. His was the only car left in the lot, but out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw The Engineer again. No, just an illusion.
A song came into his head as he headed for the door. If there’s something strange, in your neighborhood, who ya gonna call … if there’s something weird, and it don’t look good, who ya gonna call…. Come Monday, he would make some calls.
Fin
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- An almost-true story
It was a dark and stormy night. The VP stared out into the parking lot as the lightning flashed, illuminating the cars in a ghostly backlight. As he reached for a pretzel rod from the giant jar on his desk, an apparition appeared at his door; it was The Engineer.
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